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Why are trannies so touchy? So touchy that even that use of the word ‘tranny’ – which, yes, is designed to make a point – will have them reaching for their pots of green ink so that they can pen outraged missives about what a transphobic monster I am?

We live in an era of über-sensitivity, in which it’s the done thing among minority groups of every persuasion to trawl the media and internet and gutter for offence, so they can holler to the world: ‘I’m being victimised! Give me recognition for my suffering! (And a government grant, so that I can turn my hobby of hunting down slights against me into an actual career.)’

But even in this time of ostentatious offence-taking, transgender activists stand out. They’re more allergic to offence than any of the other ‘vulnerable’ groups. Even the self-elected spokespeople of the Muslim community, never shy in coming forward to proclaim their victimisation at the hands of mainstream society’s white, post-colonial rotters, don’t have a patch on trans folk. Trans activists are the kings (or queens? Jesus, I don’t know) of offence-taking. Why?

To see how intolerant the trans lobby has become, look no further than the Courier-Mail controversy. The ink was barely dry on the print run that contained the phrase ‘she-male’ before trans activists were smashing their iPads as they bashed out tweets and articles condemning it.

In its frontpage report on the murder of Mayang Prasetyo, a transgendered prostitute, the Courier-Mail described Ms Prasetyo as a ‘she-male’. It later referred to her as a ‘ladyboy’. Bad move. These terms are not on the transgender lobby’s list of utterable words, which it enforces with brutal effectiveness.

The Courier-Mail was slammed as ‘absolutely disgusting’, ‘sensationalist’ and ‘dangerous’. Boycotts of the paper were organised. An online petition was set up – the favoured tool of the modern-day mob, which hurls tweets rather than rotten tomatoes and signs petitions instead of death warrants – demanding that the Courier-Mail ‘publicly apologise’ for having blasphemed against the po-mo gospel of trans terminology. More than 25,000 people have signed the petition. In an irony so profound it could make your head hurt, they’re probably the same people who would scoff into their hazelnut macchiatos if a Christian group tried to extract an apology from a newspaper for blaspheming against Christ. ‘Who do these people think they are?!’, they’d say, with not a smidgen of self-awareness.

Eventually the Courier-Mail published a follow-up piece saying it did not mean to diminish Ms Prasetyo. But it failed to use the s-word – sorry – and so the Stalin-style demanders of a craven public apology for offences against language and ideology kept on campaigning. They won’t be happy until Courier-Mail editors self-flagellate for their speech crimes.

Such censoriousness, such an urge to punish those who fail to use words that an infinitesimally small number of campaigners have decreed to be Correct, is a central plank of trans activism. The trans intolerants do proud the pointy-hatted moral cops of the medieval era, who likewise leapt upon and branded despicable anyone who didn’t speak as they did.

In Britain the rambunctious Julie Burchill became the target of trans headhunters when she wrote an article in the Observer which – get this – criticised transgenderism. How dare she! Incredibly, under pressure from a mob of placard-waving morality enforcers dolled up as radical gender-benders, the Observer removed her piece from its website, and plunged it down the memory hole.

I found myself the target of spittle-flecked hate-tweets and an online petition calling for me to be censored when I wrote a piece earlier this year arguing that Conchita Wurst, the Austrian trans who won the Eurovision Song Contest, is not a ‘she’. Wurst has a beard. And a penis. And yet apparently it is ‘disgusting’ and ‘transphobic’ to say he is a man. Such is the Orwellianism of the trans lobby that, just as Big Brother thought he could insist that 2 + 2 = 5, so it can say: beard + dick + ballgown = woman. It is authoritarianism of the highest order to think not only do you have the right to police the world, but also to reinvent it from pure cloth (in this case fabulous, well-cut cloth). War is peace, freedom is slavery, man is woman.

What motors trans intolerance? Partly it’s the same arrogance and snobbery that underpins every effort to police language and squash offensiveness. The Australian Transgender Support Association gave the game away when it said the Courier-Mail’s headline would set ‘all our hard work back two or three years’. Rough translation: readers – especially the gruff blokes and tipsy Sheilas who read the Courier-Mail – are so fickle that one headline is likely to turn them into trans-bashing nutjobs. All censoriousness is fuelled by a fear of the dim, daft, fat public; trans intolerance is no different.

But there’s something more behind the super-shrillness of trans activists. It’s that they recognise, at some level, that their identity is a phoney, or at least a flimsy, one. Their fire-wielding response to every slight confirms this is a ‘community’ instinctively aware of the shallowness of its identity, which means it must obsessively protect itself from public questioning lest its facade be knocked down.

In essence, transgenderism is a mental difficultly dressed up as a cultural identity. It presents itself as an identity on a par with being black or a woman, but this is disingenuous, for transgenderism is not rooted in history or culture but in bodily self-loathing. No matter how many attractive-sounding words get attached to transgenderism, there’s no escaping the fact that it is, at heart, a desire for physical mutilation to try to fix a profound personal identity crisis. And that, in my view, is not positive or healthy. It’s a bad idea. And we should be free to say so.

The debatephobia of the trans lobby is really about hiding the hollowness of its identity, through suppressing not only the asking of intellectual questions about the wisdom of calling biological men ‘women’ but even the use of certain words. This, too, is a common theme in censoriousness: like other censors, only more so, the trans lobby is driven by a feeling of weakness, not strength, and by a forlorn urge to prop up its ideological pretensions through shutting down anyone who would dare try to prick them. (No offence intended by my use of the word prick.)